Leave the cotton behind in favor of technical fabrics and constructions that help you pile on the miles.
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Monday, April 27, 2020
Orleans Parish Had Highest Per-Capita COVID-19 Death Rate By Far Of U.S. Counties
Residents in Orleans Parish are dying of COVID-19 coronavirus at an alarming rate. It has the highest per-capita death rate of all U.S. counties, according to NOLA.com. The report states that one out of every 10,000 residents had succumbed to the virus.
That death toll is even higher that New York’s Richmond County – commonly known as Staten Island – which has the second-highest death rate. It is not a close second, however, as Staten Island only has half the amount of deaths as Orleans Parish.
Experts predicted New Orleans was on track to become the next coronavirus epicenter, reported Reuters. Since the city didn’t have its first official diagnosis until March 14, its numbers mark the highest growth of coronavirus cases. The fast rates of infection in Big Easy can hit the rest of the South hard.
Dr. Rebekah Gee leads Louisiana State University’s (LSU) health care services division and was the state’s former health secretary. She said Mardi Gras could be to blame for the alarming outbreak.
“Mardi Gras was the perfect storm, it provided the perfect conditions for the spread of this virus,” Gee told Reuters.
Other health experts share Gee’s theory, meaning they believe the coronavirus had already begun infecting people in the states sooner than initially thought.
Susanne Straif-Bourgeois is a professor at LSU Health Sciences School of Public Health and an expert on pandemics.
“I think we have a huge number of undiagnosed people,” Straif-Bourgeois told NOLA.com. “Our model shows it started around Mardi Gras and spread. And we only tested people sick enough to be hospitalized, which means most people were not diagnosed because they might have mild signs and symptoms or [could] be asymptomatic and be contributing to the transmission.”
Add to that the fact that many New Orleans residents experience higher rates of health challenges like obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc. and they may be more likely to experience complications that lead to death from the virus.
Harvard University Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said testing is still an issue, but noted counting deaths per capita may be a more effective way to determine the size of the pandemic.
Since health experts are still working to find the best way to measure whether a death was due to the coronavirus alone, Lipstick echoed Straif-Bourgeois’ assertion that there were still many undiagnosed cases, even among the fatalities. Due to Katrina, Lipstich said Louisiana may have more effective procedures concerning this.
“We should consider that maybe the testing of fatal cases has been more effective there (in Louisiana) than in other places,” Lipsitch said. “I think a lot of deaths [attributable to coronavirus] have been undetected.”
This article was written by Isheka N. Harrison for The Moguldom Nation.
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E-Commerce Entrepreneurship Grows as Unemployment Rises Amid COVID-19
The global spread of COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, has caused a complete shift in our culture and how we do business. Under state governments, many major cities across the country have issued mandatory stay-at-home orders for residents and closed down all “non-essential” brick-and-mortar businesses. Because of the pandemic, over 25 million people have filed for unemployment while many small businesses have been forced to retreat to the internet to stay connected with their customers. The result has created a surge in the growth of online businesses that are thriving in the digital space.
While the viral outbreak has caused many businesses to close their doors, others are learning to adapt to the changing landscape and utilizing digital storefronts and their social media accounts to find new ways to earn revenue through the pandemic. According to reports from Adobe Analytics, the U.S. e-commerce industry has seen an overall 25% increase in sales just in the month of March. Other services like delivery apps, virtual workshops, and digital services have also experienced an increase as well due to the viral outbreak.
Reports also show that pickup orders are also on the rise with the number of purchases shoppers have bought online and picked up in-store increasing 62% year-over-year during February and March 2020.
While consumers have been shifting their purchasing more to online from stores over the past few years, the pandemic has accelerated this shift. Adobe Analytics did not provide comparable year-over-year online sales, but the data collected does show for the first quarter of 2019, online sales increased by 11.9% year-over-year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
“U.S. consumers are turning to e-commerce more during the COVID-19 outbreak due to the fact that social distancing measures and shelter-in-place orders have made online shopping more convenient or, in some cases, the only way to get the goods they need,” Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights said to Digital Commerce 360.
Schreiner explains that the elevated levels of online shopping in the U.S. will likely continue as long as shelter-in-place orders remain in effect.
“The big unknown is whether consumers who become used to more online shopping will stick with it, even when social distancing measures are removed.”
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Sunday, April 26, 2020
Engineers develop precision injection system for plants
While the human world is reeling from one pandemic, there are several ongoing epidemics that affect crops and put global food production at risk. Oranges, olives, and bananas are already under threat in many areas due to diseases that affect plants’ circulatory systems and that cannot be treated by applying pesticides.
A new method developed by engineers at MIT may offer a starting point for delivering life-saving treatments to plants ravaged by such diseases.
These diseases are difficult to detect early and to treat, given the lack of precision tools to access plant vasculature to treat pathogens and to sample biomarkers. The MIT team decided to take some of the principles involved in precision medicine for humans and adapt them to develop plant-specific biomaterials and drug-delivery devices.
The method uses an array of microneedles made of a silk-based biomaterial to deliver nutrients, drugs, or other molecules to specific parts of the plant. The findings are described in the journal Advanced Science, in a paper by MIT professors Benedetto Marelli and Jing-Ke-Weng, graduate student Yunteng Cao, postdoc Eugene Lim at MIT, and postdoc Menglong Xu at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
The microneedles, which the researchers call phytoinjectors, can be made in a variety of sizes and shapes, and can deliver material specifically to a plant’s roots, stems, or leaves, or into its xylem (the vascular tissue involved in water transportation from roots to canopy) or phloem (the vascular tissue that circulates metabolites throughout the plant). In lab tests, the team used tomato and tobacco plants, but the system could be adapted to almost any crop, they say. The microneedles can not only deliver targeted payloads of molecules into the plant, but they can also be used to take samples from the plants for lab analysis.
The work started in response to a request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for ideas on how to address the citrus greening crisis, which is threatening the collapse of a $9 billion industry, Marelli says. The disease is spread by an insect called the Asian citrus psyllid that carries a bacterium into the plant. There is as yet no cure for it, and millions of acres of U.S. orchards have already been devastated. In response, Marelli’s lab swung into gear to develop the novel microneedle technology, led by Cao as his thesis project.
The disease infects the phloem of the whole plant, including roots, which are very difficult to reach with any conventional treatment, Marelli explains. Most pesticides are simply sprayed or painted onto a plant’s leaves or stems, and little if any penetrates to the root system. Such treatments may appear to work for a short while, but then the bacteria bounce back and do their damage. What is needed is something that can target the phloem circulating through a plant’s tissues, which could carry an antibacterial compound down into the roots. That’s just what some version of the new microneedles could potentially accomplish, he says.
“We wanted to solve the technical problem of how you can have a precise access to the plant vasculature,” Cao adds. This would allow researchers to inject pesticides, for example, that would be transported between the root system and the leaves. Present approaches use “needles that are very large and very invasive, and that results in damaging the plant,” he says. To find a substitute, they built on previous work that had produced microneedles using silk-based material for injecting human vaccines.
“We found that adaptations of a material designed for drug delivery in humans to plants was not straightforward, due to differences not only in tissue vasculature, but also in fluid composition,” Lim says. The microneedles designed for human use were intended to biodegrade naturally in the body’s moisture, but plants have far less available water, so the material didn’t dissolve and was not useful for delivering the pesticide or other macromolecules into the phloem. The researchers had to design a new material, but they decided to stick with silk as its basis. That’s because of silk’s strength, its inertness in plants (preventing undesirable side effects), and the fact that it degrades into tiny particles that don’t risk clogging the plant’s internal vasculature systems.
They used biotechnology tools to increase silk’s hydrophilicity (making it attract water), while keeping the material strong enough to penetrate the plant’s epidermis and degradable enough to then get out of the way.
Sure enough, they tested the material on their lab tomato and tobacco plants, and were able to observe injected materials, in this case fluorescent molecules, moving all they way through the plant, from roots to leaves.
“We think this is a new tool that can be used by plant biologists and bioengineers to better understand transport phenomena in plants,” Cao says. In addition, it can be used “to deliver payloads into plants, and this can solve several problems. For example, you can think about delivering micronutrients, or you can think about delivering genes, to change the gene expression of the plant or to basically engineer a plant.”
“Now, the interests of the lab for the phytoinjectors have expanded beyond antibiotic delivery to genetic engineering and point-of-care diagnostics,” Lim adds.
For example, in their experiments with tobacco plants, they were able to inject an organism called Agrobacterium to alter the plant’s DNA – a typical bioengineering tool, but delivered in a new and precise way.
So far, this is a lab technique using precision equipment, so in its present form it would not be useful for agricultural-scale applications, but the hope is that it can be used, for example, to bioengineer disease-resistant varieties of important crop plants. The team has also done tests using a modified toy dart gun mounted to a small drone, which was able to fire microneedles into plants in the field. Ultimately, such a process might be automated using autonomous vehicles, Marelli says, for agricultural-scale use.
Meanwhile, the team continues to work on adapting the system to the varied needs and conditions of different kinds of plants and their tissues. “There’s a lot of variation among them, really,” Marelli says, so you need to think about having devices that are plant-specific. For the future, our research interests will go beyond antibiotic delivery to genetic engineering and point-of-care diagnostics based on metabolite sampling.”
The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Keck Foundation.
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Toyota & CVS Are Creating Relief Initiatives To Help Vulnerable Communities Amid COVID-19
As the COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, pandemic worsens, major corporations have been stepping up their efforts to offer relief programs to communities impacted by the public health crisis. Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) and CVS Health are the latest corporations spreading awareness and offering free services to marginalized communities hit hard by the virus.
Toyota has created a special Community Service Announcement (CSA) called #UsAgainstCOVID to bring awareness and spread credible information to black and Hispanic communities around the country which are among the hardest hit by the virus. The CSA, featuring a number of high-profile celebrities including Anthony Anderson, Cedric The Entertainer and Lupita Infante, aims to help these affected communities understand the risks, share steps on how to avoid contracting the virus, and direct them to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website for more information.
“With the aim of giving back to the American communities in which we operate, we partnered with high-profile celebrities to bring an important prevention message to communities of color that have been disproportionately impacted by this deadly virus,” said Chris Reynolds, chief administrative officer, Manufacturing and Corporate Resources for Toyota in a press statement. “We moved quickly to make this CSA and are hopeful it will make a meaningful impact in the communities hardest hit by the COVID pandemic. We’re all in this together and we must work together to regain the health of our country, no matter where we live.”
CVS Health announced the launch of its new COVID-19 drive-thru testing site in Dearborn, Michigan, as part of a partnership with federal and state officials. The site will provide state residents with COVID-19 testing and on-the-spot results at no cost, using the new Abbott ID NOW
COVID-19 test. CVS Health has opened similar large-scale rapid testing sites in Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, conducting more than 35,000 COVID-19 tests.
“We’re delivering on our commitment to helping increase the frequency and efficiency of testing,” said Troyen Brennan, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, and executive vice president, CVS Health in a statement. “Based on discussions we’re having with other states we expect our testing capacity will continue to increase, subject to availability of supplies.”
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Billionaires get $282 billion richer, 26 million Americans file jobless claims during pandemic
Coronavirus has hit Americans hard.
More than 50,000 have died of complications, more than 939,000 individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 and tens of millions are out of work.
However, according to Fast Company, billionaires are benefiting during the pandemic. Since the pandemic intensified in the United States last month, billionaires have seen their fortunes grow collectively by 10%, or an estimated $282 billion.
In that same timeframe, investors watched the stock market fall off a cliff and government officials counted more than 26 million Americans who filed for unemployment claims in the past five weeks.
READ MORE: 26 million have sought US unemployment benefits since virus hit
For instance, the two who have benefited most from the pandemic are Amazon and Zoom Video Communications. After witnessing his wealth drop to $105 billion in mid-March during the initial stock market crash, Amazon head Jeff Bezos‘ net worth has grown $25 billion this year. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, one of few not affected by the said crash, watched his net worth climb to $2.58 billion, Fast Money reported.
With many states given stay-at-home orders, Zoom has been the app of choice when it comes to online communication for meetings and video podcasts. Consumer demand on Amazon surely has spiked as countless retailers closed stores to help in the fight against the fast-spreading virus.
READ MORE: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez voted against new stimulus package: It was ‘too small’
A major contributing factor to the rise of billionaires’ earnings has been tax cuts in recent decades. According to a report by the progressive think tank Institute of Policy Studies, taxes on the highest earners in America have dropped 79 percent over the past 40 years.
Chuck Collins, the institute’s director of Program on Inequality and the Common Good, said much of the money billionaires could’ve paid in taxes may have helped contribute to the pandemic.
“We’re reading about benevolent billionaires sharing .0001% of their wealth with their fellow humans in this crisis, but in fact they’ve been rigging the tax rules to reduce their taxes for decades — money that could have been spent building a better public health infrastructure,” Collins told Fast Money.
The post Billionaires get $282 billion richer, 26 million Americans file jobless claims during pandemic appeared first on TheGrio.
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Poll: 70% of Americans Want The Government To Focus On Public Health In Coronavirus Response
A poll released earlier this week showed the majority of Americans want the government to focus on public safety instead of profits in the coronavirus response.
According to Forbes, the poll, released Thursday by CBS News and YouGov, showed 30% of people surveyed said the government’s priority should be restarting the economy. The poll fell mostly along partisan lines with 91% of Democrats and 69% of Independents favoring focusing on public health. Fifty-two percent of Republicans say the economy should take precedence.
Anti-quarantine protests have taken place in several states including Colorado, California, and Michigan. However, the poll showed little public support. Less than 25% of the poll’s respondents said they support the protests, and less than 10% think that Trump should encourage them. The protests initially had the support of President Trump, but even he’s changing his tune. Trump criticized Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s plan to reopen businesses on Wednesday.
Less than 50% said they would be comfortable going to work and less than 15% said they would attend a large entertainment or sports event. However, 54% of respondents are getting cabin fever saying they would be willing to visit their friends.
The numbers are an indication that although Americans are hurting financially, they want the government to choose people over profits. More than 20 million people are currently unemployed and many Americans have said they already need another relief payment.
A Politico poll conducted last week showed 81% of Americans believe the country “should continue to maintain social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of the coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy. Just 10% of Americans believe they “should stop social distancing to stimulate the economy, even if it means increasing the spread of coronavirus.”
Since the outbreak began, President Trump’s response has been repeatedly criticized with some describing his response as erratic at best and dangerous at worst.
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